RTI’s Low-Latency Messaging Now Integrated with Microsoft Excel

RTI, The Real-Time Middleware Experts, today introduced an add-in to Microsoft Excel that provides bi-directional integration between Excel and RTI’s low-latency messaging infrastructure. With this add-in, data within Excel spreadsheets, formula results and charts can be automatically updated in real time whenever changes to the underlying data are published via RTI middleware. Formula results can also be automatically published in real-time to other applications and users, including other instances of Microsoft Excel, Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications, and custom applications developed using RTI’s application programming interfaces.

Microsoft Excel is widely used for portfolio analysis, to calculate valuations and to manage capital structure models. Traditionally, integrating Excel with real-time data has required extensive custom development and often resulted in the addition of significant latency. RTI’s integration eliminates the need for custom development and delivers the lowest possible latency by taking advantage of the Real-Time Data (RTD) feature of Excel. Spreadsheets can directly subscribe to streaming data, such as market data, without having any impact on existing publishers or requiring any software to be installed or managed other than the add-in itself. Likewise, data published from spreadsheets are delivered directly to subscribers without the need for a gateway.

RTI’s Microsoft Excel add-in leverages the advanced, content-aware capabilities of RTI’s middleware to seamlessly integrate with existing systems. Little or no configuration is required. The add-in automatically discovers existing topics (subjects) and message schemas; a wizard allows publications and subscription to be easily added by selecting the desired topics and message fields. When data are published faster than needed by Excel spreadsheets, time-based and content filters can be used to limit the amount of information received. RTI’s automatic slow subscriber handling ensures that publishers are not impacted.

“RTI’s add-in for Microsoft Excel clearly illustrates the benefits of our content-aware messaging infrastructure,” commented Henry Sun, director of Financial Services Product Management and Strategy for RTI. “Because RTI based applications can automatically discover and parse message types and topics, we are able to provide a turnkey integration with Excel that can be used by traders with little or no configuration. The result is faster time-to-value, lower maintenance costs, and higher performance compared to traditional solutions that require custom code or extensive configuration.”